Tahar Rahim on Netflix’s The Serpent and ‘Bikini Killer’ Charles Sobhraj

Every villain is the hero of their own story but that doesn’t make it easy to connect with them, even when you’re portraying them.

There are two very different Tahar Rahim performances in the world right now.

The first one is in The Mauritanian, where he played a warm and thoughtful Guantanamo detainee who despite being tortured, retained his humanity. In the second, in Netflix series The Serpent, he plays a serial killer whose cold demeanour only thaws if he needs to seduce a victim.

For the twice-BAFTA nominated and Cesar winning French actor, Mohamedou in The Mauritanian and Charles in The Serpent were both “beautiful parts” but also “really opposite”.

Filming the two projects back-to-back was also challenging for Rahim, to shed the skin of one character and step into another that was so fundamentally different – especially as it was actually more like back-to-back-to-back-to-break-to-back.

Finding the key to Charles was harder than most would expect.

Rahim started work on The Serpent, a 1970s-set miniseries about Charles Sobhraj, the so-called “Bikini Killer” responsible for at least 12 murders of backpackers along Asia’s Hippie Trail, in August 2019.

But the schedules were thrown off and that meant he had to stop production on The Serpent to go and shoot The Mauritanian and then immediately back to The Serpent in Thailand. Then COVID hit and production was shut down for months before the series completed the final two weeks in the small English town of Tring, set up to look like Thailand.

“Hats off to the production because they recreated India and Thailand in Tring!” he tells news.com.au over zoom.

Tahar Rahim said he struggled to be in the mindset of serial killer Charles Sobhraj. Photographer: Roland Neveu

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Rahim is much more expressive and open than his on-screen portrayal of Charles Sobhraj, a character who holds himself in physically but with the lithe movement of the reptile he’s nicknamed after.

Rahim even watched documentaries about cobras to find the physicality of his deadly character, an impostor and con artist who played many roles to capture his prey.

Boyish smile on his face, Rahim explains that going back-and-forth between the two characters was “dizzy”.

“I mean, to go from Charles to Mohamedou was OK, I found my way, but to go from Mohamedou to Charles was complicated.

“I became really involved in Mohamedou and for some reason I couldn’t get out of my character for three weeks afterwards. So, I had to prepare to get back to The Serpent and it was very hard, it was strange mental gymnastics. I had to ask them to send me some edited episodes and footage so I can get back to it slowly.”

Tahar Rahim as Mohamedou Salahi in The Mauritanian, a role for which he has been nominated for a BAFTA.

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Rahim was born in 1981 in France, the youngest of 10 children, and it was in the pages of a book on his brother’s nightstand where he first met Sobhraj, whose crimes had been documented by Richard Neville and Julie Clarke in On the Trail of The Serpent.

“Everything started when I was 16,” Tahar says. “I read the book and I wanted to be an actor. I was reading about an actor in a way, and it was French. So that might be the reason why I wanted to play him someday.

“In 2001, Benicio Del Toro and William Friedkin were preparing the movie, so I was like, ‘ah, bummer’. But it never happened. When I got an email 20 years later about playing Charles, I was shocked. I thought, ‘Well, fate really can be surprising sometimes’”.

Despite his long gestating desire to take on the role, Rahim found it hard to connect with the character on the page – who could blame him, most humans would find it difficult to be in the mindset of a killer.

He thought about meeting the real-life Sobhraj who languishes in a Nepalese prison, now aged 76, but ruled it out, thinking about the victims.

It was only when the real-life Nadine Gires – someone who knew Sobhraj from the 1970s and is portrayed in the series by Mathilde Warnier – came on set in Thailand, where she still lives, and told others that seeing Rahim as Sobhraj made her scared and took her back to that time, did he have the confidence that he was on the right track.

With co-star Jenna Coleman in The Serpent. Photographer: Roland Neveu

But the clincher was a line in the script from the third episode, spoken by Sobhraj, which provided the most relatable insight into someone so unfathomable.

“When he says to Monique, when he tells her who he really is for the first time, he says, ‘If I had to wait for the world to come to me, I’d be waiting still, everything I ever wanted, I had to take it’.

“And this is what happened to me in my acting life. I come from the countryside, none of my siblings are connected to the business. I had to take my bag, a train, a little bit of money and come to Paris. I had to work hard to take it.

“So, then the puzzle started to come together. I can’t explain it, but you feel like you’re in the right place. It’s a strange place, very strange. I still can’t find the right words but it’s strange to live with this guy.

“You don’t want to be him. Each time I’d wrap, I’d go to the gym to let it out, plus I had to stay fit, so I had to let it out good.”

Scenes like this were the other reason Tahar Rahim was hitting the gym. Photographer: Roland Neveu

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Rahim has been in industry since 2007 and his big international break was in acclaimed 2009 French film A Prophet. But he’s mostly worked in Europe. With the release of The Serpent on Netflix coinciding with The Mauritanian on Amazon Prime Video, it’s a different ballgame.

And The Serpent is an accessible, broadly appealing series that is likely to draw in a more mainstream audience than another Netflix series he had a supporting role in, the beautifully crafted but esoteric Parisian jazz drama The Eddy, produced by Oscar-winning director Damien Chazelle.

We already know The Serpent pulled in great numbers in the UK when it premiered on the BBC and its streaming platform iPlayer. Now with the series streaming into Netflix’s 200 million households around the world, Rahim could be launched into a different stratosphere of recognition.

He tries not to think about it too much, but when pushed, he’s modestly excited.

“It’s exciting because when you do movies, you make them so people can see them,” he says. “You get a little bit disappointed if you make a movie and no one sees it. Each time I work, I give my all, especially when it’s something that is, let’s say, good. You want people to see it.”

The Serpent is streaming now on Netflix

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Originally published as Tahar Rahim on Netflix’s The Serpent and ‘Bikini Killer’ Charles Sobhraj